Whilst Jagex were happy to allow overpowered items run amok there was one glaring problem that they wouldn't abide - and rightfully so: so-called real world trading; this is, the trade of real money for in-game items. In late 2007, Jagex removed the entire notion of'free' trade from the game - meaning that transactions have to be fair in the eyes of the Grand Exchange, with a rather restricted allowance for imbalance. This meant that the rewards for PvP were hugely neutered - since formerly the successful player would keep RSGOLDFAST Lottery 100% of the spoils, the most value that could be dropped by a defeated combatant was seriously confined to prevent illegal transactions. No more could a participant lend their friend a sum of cash to get their account began; nor can a player winning a PvP duel pocket over a couple thousand coins - than hundreds of millions that were often put at stake. To say this update was very unpopular is a massive understatement, and it was the decision that ultimately contributed to several diehard fans stopping the match just months after the membership base passed one million. The busy playerbase plummeted, and also the match which had in its summit seen concurrent online-players from the hundreds of thousands was facing a mass exodus. This wasn't the death of RuneScape, nevertheless; nor was it that the passing of the match's unique quality. With this stage, the match had witnessed 130 quests released - most of which composed with the exact same tongue-in-cheek humour and occasional pop-culture references which lent a few undeniable allure to the match and kept players interested, one seven-quest narrative even ended up crossing nearly 13 years.

2012 brought with it many claws which could find themselves hammered into RuneScape's coffin. The first of which was the odious, yet depressingly inevitable'Squeal of Fortune' (a term that I will use sparingly because the act of simply writing it causes me to inhale ) - a cynical gambling mechanic that allowed Jagex (and their new majority shareholders) to squeeze microtransactions to the treasured MMORPG. Incredibly, but this was not the year's least popular upgrade, as a collection of graphic changes took away the lovably chunky kind of the game's armours in favour of shinier (and in my opinion a lot more boring) versions. The last - and arguably the biggest - nail came with an entire overhaul of the combat system - substituting the simplistic tick-based system with a more complex mechanic which demanded the use of unique skills and continuous player input - à la every other MMORPG below sunlight. Whilst the machine itself was not really all that dreadful and may somewhat be regarded as an advancement, it - along with the armour visuals upgrade - demonstrated just how tone-deaf Jagex were about what the majority of veteran players adored about the game. Jagex eventually realised that, almost unbearably cynically, they might sell the old, beloved armour layouts as decorative items for real-world money (demonstrating that the custom of so-called real-world trading has been actually okay, as long as Jagex were performing it).

Finally though, Jagex realised the obvious - something frequently requested that it almost become a running joke: that they should re-release the edition of this game people had originally fallen in love with. Unofficial private servers containing rolled-back variations of the match were becoming more popular as the game transformed what it was, and it took up how to buy osrs gold until 2013 to get Jagex to realise they themselves might tap in their success. Their plan was genius: 2007's RuneScape attracted back how it had been, with user polls deciding upon future updates and tweaks in order to not violate the famously conservative fanbase. It was such a good idea, in actuality, that Blizzard recently announced their plans to launch rolled-back variations of World of Warcraft. RuneScape's legacy version turned out to be a fantastic success, and even now player numbers of'Old-School' RuneScape far outweigh the glistening'EoC' variant. Jagex realised the nostalgia sells, to great effect - and finally, the players who'd become so alienated by shift had their game back. To Jagex's charge, both variations of the game -'older' and'new' - receive frequent updates and fixes, even though it seems history is doomed to repeat itself and they will continue branching out various avenues until one is entirely unrecognisable in the other.